We are pleased to announce that our research article ‘Voting Age Reform, Political Partisanship and Multi-Level Governance in the UK: The Party Politics of ‘Votes-at-16” has been published in the academic Journal Parliamentary Affairs.
In the article based on interviews with UK politicians at Westminster, Cardiff and Edinburgh carried out as part of our Leverhulme Trust funded research project on the UK voting age debate Jon Tonge , Tom Loughran and Andy Mycock explore the political implications of the assymetrical introduction of Votes-at-16 in the UK with 16 and 17 year olds having the right to vote in some UK countries (and in some elections) but not others. We argue that;
-This has lead to an unprecedented geographic division of age based voting rights within the UK based on multi-level governance.
-That the voting age debate at the UK national level has largely been catalysed by the policy debates and policy process that has taken place at the devolved level in Wales and Scotland.
-This multi-level aspect to the party politics of the ‘Votes-at-16’ debate has consolidated partisan divides on the issue within Westminster but that these divisions are not reflected at the devolved level where the policy process around voting age reform has been comparatively consensual.
The article features in a special edition of Parliamentary Affairs focusing on the ‘Votes-at-16 debate’ which also includes an article by other project members Christine Hüebner and Jan Eichhorn on how young people experience the right to vote in Scotland as well as articles by Joe Greenwood and Raynee S Gutting, and Ben Bowman.
The full article can be read here.
A link to the special edition of Parliamentary Affairs can be read here.